Spearfishing the Mediterranean and Atlantic: A Guide for Aussie Spearos
Guest post by Marco Reyes of Fishes One Hook
Every year a few Aussie spearos land in Europe with a 130 railgun, a summer wetsuit and a plan built for the Coral Sea. Most of them spend the first week confused. The water is calm and clear, the fish are small and educated, nobody owns a boat, and the bloke checking licences on the beach speaks four languages and accepts none of your excuses.
None of that makes Europe a bad trip. It makes it a different sport played in the same gear, and if you set your expectations right it is one of the best diving holidays you can do. This guide is built from year-round diving on both coasts, the Med and the Atlantic, and covers everything a visiting spearo should know before booking the flight.
Why Euro waters are a different animal
Start with the mindset shift, because it matters more than any gear choice.
The fish are smaller and smarter. The Mediterranean has been speared since before spearguns had triggers. A 2 kg sea bream here earns the same nod a 10 kg trevally gets at home. The upside is that hunting pressured fish will sharpen your technique like nothing else. Divers who learn agachon and tight shot discipline in the Med go home deadlier.
It is a shore culture, not a boat culture. The default European trip is a rental car, a coastal road and a pair of fins, not a charter. Parking above a headland, kitting up in a car park and finning out 300 m is the normal way to dive here, and it makes trips cheap.
The water is clear but crowded. Twenty metre vis is routine in the Med in summer. So are swimmers, ferries, marine reserves and other spearos. Reading the coastline for pressure, and diving at first light, matters as much as reading it for structure.
The rules change at every border. Australia has state rules; Europe has national ones, sometimes regional ones, and they genuinely differ. A dive that is legal in Italy can be a fine in France and a court date in Germany. Section five deals with this properly.
The two playgrounds: Mediterranean vs Atlantic
Europe gives you two very different oceans a few hours’ drive apart.
The Mediterranean is the warm one. Summer water runs 22 to 26 °C, vis is often 20 m plus, tides are close to nonexistent and most days the sea is flat enough for a paddleboard. It is relaxed, beautiful diving where the challenge is the fish, not the conditions. The trade-off is pressure: every decent headland within walking distance of a town gets dived.
The Atlantic is the wild one. Colder (14 to 20 °C depending on latitude and season), real swell, real tides, and vis that lives between 3 and 10 m on a good day. It feels much more like home for anyone who dives southern Australia. The reward for the harder conditions is bigger fish, fewer divers and long stretches of coast that see almost no pressure.
My honest advice: do both. A Med week teaches you finesse, an Atlantic week gives you the fish stories. The sample itinerary at the end is built exactly that way.
When to come
The happy accident for Australians is that Europe’s best diving lands in the Aussie winter.
Med: August to October is prime. Water and vis peak in late summer, the crowds thin out after August, and October can be the best month of the year: warm water, empty beaches, hungry fish. June and July are good too, just busier. Winter Med diving (December to March) is doable in a 5 mm suit but short days and 14 °C water make it a locals’ game.
Atlantic: May to October is the window. The ocean needs settled weather, so you are hunting for the flat spells between systems. September is usually the sweet spot: the summer heat has soaked in, the water is at its warmest and the autumn swells have not started. Watch the forecast obsessively; the Atlantic will hand you three flat days and then close for a week.
If you can only make one trip: September. Both coasts fire, and it lines up with the tail end of your off season.
What you’ll be hunting
A realistic species rundown, not a trophy list.
In the Med: white seabream (sargo) is the classic quarry, wary and delicious. Dentex is the prestige fish, a proper predator that hunts the drop offs. Amberjack show up around structure and bait balls in late summer. Sea bass, mullet and barracuda round out the everyday hunting, and the barracuda here school in numbers that will surprise you.
In the Atlantic: sea bass is king, stalked in the white water the same way you would hunt the wash at home. Pollack sit over reefs and wrecks and come to a flasher. Gilthead bream patrol the sand edges, and big mullet are everywhere and harder to spear than they look.
The grouper note, and it matters: dusky grouper are protected or effectively off limits in much of the Med. France has had a moratorium for decades, and other countries restrict them. Do not build your trip around a grouper photo. Treat any legal grouper as a bonus, know the local rule before you load the gun, and let the big friendly ones on the reserve boundaries be.
The permit maze, country by country
The section nobody warns you about. Australia mostly lets you spear first and asks questions later; Europe wants paperwork first, and every country runs its own system.
One warning before the table: rules change, constantly. Costs and systems below were checked against official sources in mid 2026, but treat them as orientation, not authority. Verify with the local authority before every trip and every dive. I keep a longer explanation of how licence systems work in our guide to spearfishing laws and licences if you want the full picture.
| Country | Licence needed? | Rough cost | The thing to know |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | Yes, regional | €20 to €30 plus a medical certificate | Every autonomous community issues its own licence, and the medical cert (about €50) catches travellers out. Sort it before you fly. |
| Portugal | Yes | About €10 a month | Online licensing that actually works for foreigners. The easiest system in Europe. |
| France | Yes | About €40 a year | Arranged through clubs or port authorities, and accident insurance is required. |
| Italy | No | Free | No licence, but stay 500 m from busy beach resorts, out of ports and away from fresh water. |
| Greece | No | Free | The licence was suspended in 2017. No night diving, no torches, 200 m from bathing beaches. |
| Croatia | Yes | About €60 for 10 days | You must join a spearfishing club to get the permit. It can all be done online. |
And the two rules that repeat everywhere: no spearfishing on scuba, and no spearfishing at night. Both are banned essentially EU wide. Expect a standard buffer of roughly 200 m from swimmers and harbour mouths, daily bag limits in the 3 to 5 kg range, and marine protected areas that are genuinely enforced.
Shore vs boat, and how Europeans actually dive
The European default is the shore dive, and the whole culture is arranged around it. Here is what that looks like in practice.
The float and flag are not optional. Nearly every country requires a marker buoy with a dive flag, and in high traffic summer water you want one anyway. Tow it on everything. Local divers judge visitors on this in about four seconds.
Marine protected areas are everywhere and mapped. The Med especially is dotted with reserves, usually zoned: no take in the core, restrictions around it. The boundaries are on official maps and often on marker buoys. “I didn’t know” does not work on the water police, and fines are real money.
Distance rules protect you as much as the swimmers. The 200 m buffers exist because European beaches in summer are packed. Early mornings solve most of it: you get the fish before the crowds and you are out before the lifeguards set the flags.
Bring the buddy habit with you. Shore culture can drift into solo culture, and Europe’s quiet headlands make it tempting. The physiology does not care which hemisphere you black out in, so keep the one up, one down discipline you learned at home. We wrote up the full case in our shallow water blackout guide, and it applies word for word over here.
Boats exist, of course. Charters run out of the bigger ports and a RIB opens up coastline the car parks cannot reach. But if your plan is a rental car, a paper map and a different headland every morning, you are not doing it wrong. You are doing it the European way.
Coming ashore after a Mediterranean shore dive.
Gear tweaks for the trip
Leave the bluewater cannon at home. Here is the kit that fits the job.
Guns: 75 to 100. In 20 m of Med vis with wary 1 to 3 kg fish, a 90 is the do everything gun, an 85 or 75 for the caves and white water, maybe a 100 for Atlantic bass and pollack. Single band, simple rig. Reel guns are the local standard because shore divers cannot chase a float line through a crowded bay.
Bands matter more when the fish are small and spooky. A snappy, correctly sized band setup on a 90 beats a heavy twin band setup that throws the shaft past everything. If you are re rigging for travel, our free speargun band size calculator tells you exactly how long to cut bands for your gun and stretch ratio. Bands are also the one thing worth buying locally: every Med dive shop stocks bulk rubber.
Suits: 3 mm for the Med summer, 5 mm plus for the Atlantic. Med in September is board shorts warm at the surface but you will be doing long sessions, so a 3 mm open cell is right. The Atlantic wants a 5 mm, and a 7 mm if you head north or come early in the season.
And the one legal gear note that surprises people: spearfishing on scuba is illegal in essentially all of Europe. There is no grey area. Freediving only, everywhere you are likely to dive.
A sample two-week trip
A concrete itinerary you could copy, built around the two easiest licence systems in Europe.
Week one, the Med: Croatia. Fly into Split. Buy the 10 day permit online before you land (it includes the club membership requirement, all handled in the same process). Rent a small car and work the Dalmatian coast and islands: sargo and sea bass in the shallows at dawn, dentex on the deeper points, octopus if it is open season. Clear, calm, warm. Sleep in coastal guesthouses and eat your catch grilled with olive oil and lemon.
The weekend in the middle: fly Split to Lisbon. Cheap direct flights run all summer.
Week two, the Atlantic: Portugal. Buy the monthly online licence for about a tenner. Base in Sesimbra or head north to Peniche, watching the swell forecast, and dive the flat windows: sea bass in the wash, gilthead bream over the sand, pollack in the deeper structure. When the Atlantic closes out, drive south; the Algarve’s south coast often works when the west coast is blown out.
Total damage beyond flights: two licences for under €80, a hire car, and guesthouse beds that cost less than a night out in Sydney.
End of a session on the Atlantic coast.
Quick FAQ
Can I fly with my speargun?
Yes. Airlines treat spearguns as checked sporting equipment: broken down, unloaded, tips covered, bands packed separately, never in the cabin. Check your specific airline’s sporting goods policy the week you book, and add a gun bag with padding.
What about travel insurance?
Standard policies usually exclude spearfishing, so read the activity list before you buy. Dive specific insurers cover freediving and spearfishing explicitly, and remember France requires accident insurance for the licence anyway.
Should I bring gear or buy it there?
Bring your suit, mask and fins, because fit is everything and rental spearfishing gear barely exists. Guns and rubber are easy: coastal Spain, Italy, France and Croatia have excellent dive shops, often cheaper than Australia, and buying a travel gun there saves you the airline handling both ways.
Can a restaurant cook my catch?
Often, yes, and it is one of the joys of the Med: plenty of family tavernas will grill your fish if you ask nicely, clean it first and are not carrying half the reef. Ask before you assume. One hard rule: never try to sell your catch. Recreational catch cannot be sold anywhere in the EU, and it is the fastest way to turn a good trip into a legal problem.
Marco Reyes runs Fishes One Hook, a spearfishing blog covering the Mediterranean and Atlantic: honest gear guides, licence breakdowns and technique for shore divers. If you are planning a Euro trip and have a question the guide did not answer, the contact page reaches him directly.
